Last Wednesday I wrote this of Eric Massa:
Final phase of a great life -- a life to celebrate having led, a life to inspire us. He'll be more than missed, he'll be remembered.
And also this:
I remember his speech at the Netroots Nation 0.1 (aka Yearly Kos 1.0) in Vegas. He gave a great speech (as did Joe Sestak.) We've been lucky to have him.
That was when the news was only of Rep. Massa having developed cancer, before the same-sex sexual harassment allegations arose.
Some people are angry at him, as he seems to have shorted out a few mental circuits and ended up slagging Democrats on tomorrow's Glenn Beck show. I'm not going to beat myself up, as a former contributor, and neither should you if you supported him. Here's the dark secret of politicians:
They're only people.
There was always some danger, from the very beginning, that Rep. Massa could end up like this. I'm not shocked by the allegations of sexual harassment (though I wish for the millionth time that we didn't use the same term for inappropriate and clumsy teasing and for malicious physical assault.) Massa was, from the start, a military guy.
You celebrate enough candidates with military backgrounds in your party and you're going to wind up having supported some homophobes. Hell, you celebrate non-military guys enough and you're going to find some homophobes, but I think it's probably more common among military veterans of a certain age, who enrolled at a time before the armed forces admitted women, before American culture slowly warmed towards civil rights for gays and lesbians. Massa's almost exactly my age, and the guys I knew who went into the military back then were not the ones known for their tolerance. My sense is that, to a significant extent, that's changed.
Here's the thing, though: you don't know in advance who's going to turn out to be a homophobe or other twisted creature. Everyone deserves a chance to prove themselves devoted to equality. Now, Massa probably didn't think of himself as a homophobe -- just like old Senator Bob Packwood apparently still always thought of himself as a feminist while sexually assaulting female staffers -- and I don't have all of the information I'd need to make a real judgment of him (even if I were so disposed, which I'm not.) I'll chalk him up to culturally tone deaf.
What does sadden me about Massa is his descent into conspiratorial scenarios, which around the time Beck broadcasts tomorrow we're all going to have to live down. One the positive side, he was taking a hard line on health care (which I'm glad some were, even though I'd be incensed if any of them refused to cast a truly needed decisive vote for it.) And the story of a naked Rahm Emanuel accosting him in the shower, jabbing his finger at a soaped up Massa while abusing him for opposing some of Obama's policies from the left -- well, that's a story that (assuming that it happened) does belong in our political collective memory, and thank God that there are some people out there like Massa who will report on what it's like to share a party with a boor like Rahm.
But -- and here I have to note that I hold no brief for Steny Hoyer, whose middle name I consider to be "Who Must Never Become Speaker" -- the accusation that Hoyer and the party were trying to drive Massa out of office to win the Health Care vote is simply sad. I don't mean that in an arch or insulting way: I mean that it is simply sad. Massa does not see that the reason he was being investigated for sexual harassment was ... credible accusations of sexual harassment, as it should be. And his going to Glenn Beck to slag Democrats as the vote approaches -- damn, I hate to see that happen to his legacy.
But, you know, it's his legacy and his too-short life, and while Republicans will no doubt try to make hay out of whatever happens on Beck's show tomorrow, I'll try to be as forgiving to Massa (and to myself as his former supporter) as I can. He's just a guy. He was being himself, including the part of himself that was hidden to most of the world, and it turned out not to be good enough. It takes a person with a strong ego and a weak sense of self-preservation to run as a Democrat for a Republican seat; that can sometimes come with some baggage. (Other times, as with my old friend and another military man from CA-42, it seems to be pretty much fine. You never know.)
All I know is this: we need candidates, especially candidates for tough seats like NY-29, and some of them are going to turn out to be less sensitive and less discrete and less screwed-on tightly than we'd want. We didn't make the rules that don't allow us to x-ray someone's soul before deciding whether to support them; humanity just made the rules that say that you need a majority in two houses of Congress to get things done. Eric Massa was -- often -- part of that majority. If he had feet of clay, those are the breaks. He was never superhuman; he was just the man able to win. We needed him, we tried to get things done, we did what we could. And now we move on.